Stripe Verified

Fintech, Payments, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

Staff Software Engineer, Financial Crimes

Toronto, ONOnsiteFull TimeStaffPosted 2 months ago

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Required skills

Staff Software Engineer
Financial Crimes
Risk Engineering
Stripe
fraud
credit losses
regulatory risk
user onboarding
compliance
identity verification

Nice to have

LLMs
ML
operational workflows
case triage
review automation
fuzzy string matching

Role summary

Stripe's Risk Engineering team is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead technical direction for Financial Crimes Engineering. This role involves owning the architecture for screening, detection, and review systems, focusing on high-scale, low-latency distributed systems and policy enforcement. You will design infrastructure that balances screening accuracy with latency, build systems to surface and resolve emerging risks, and develop AI-augmented tooling for investigators. The position requires translating global regulatory requirements into technical solutions, evolving towards a multi-tenant Risk Platform, and raising engineering standards. The ideal candidate has 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years in technical leadership for infrastructure or distributed systems, with a proven track record in designing and operating high-throughput, low-latency APIs and backend systems at scale. Experience in financial crimes, AML, or related domains is preferred.

Who we are

About Stripe

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies - from the world’s largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups - use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and we have a staggering amount of work ahead. That means you have an unprecedented opportunity to put the global economy within everyone’s reach while doing the most important work of your career.

About the team

Risk Engineering builds the systems that protect Stripe from fraud, credit losses, and regulatory risk across user onboarding, compliance, financial crimes, and identity verification.

Financial Crimes Engineering builds the systems and controls that let Stripe safely onboard businesses in emerging and regulated industries while keeping Stripe in compliance with sanctions law, anti-money-laundering rules, and financial partner requirements. We keep known bad actors off Stripe, find new through ongoing detection, and build AI-augmented tooling that helps expert reviewers resolve cases quickly and accurately.

We operate at scale, screening every user, enforcing jurisdictional restrictions across money movement in real time, and automating signal acquisition and synthesis into investigation workflows. We're now re-architecting our screening platform to make it safe and easy for new Stripe products to launch with the right financial crimes controls, to express richer policy as code, and to serve as a multi-tenant Risk Platform offering across Stripe's products and subsidiaries.

What you'll do

As a Staff Engineer on Financial Crimes Engineering, you'll own technical direction across our screening, detection, and review systems. You'll design infrastructure that balances screening latency with accuracy, build the systems that surface emerging risk and collect information to resolve it, and ensure investigators have the tooling they need. You'll work across distributed systems and policy logic, partnering with ML, Legal, and Compliance to translate regulation into working software.

Responsibilities

Define technical strategy & vision: Establish the multi-year architecture for Stripe’s real-time entity matching infrastructure, policy enforcement engines, and reviewer tooling

Architect high-scale systems: Design and optimize distributed screening engines and detection pipelines handling entity- and transaction-level requests at scale with strict SLA and uptime guarantees.

Build investigations infrastructure: Design the systems that surface suspicious activity, collect additional information from users, route cases to reviewers, and augment human judgment with AI to drive faster, more accurate case resolution.

Drive cross-functional technical alignment: Serve as the primary technical voice with Legal, Compliance, ML, and Product leaders to translate evolving global regulatory requirements into technical ones.

Enable Risk as a Service: Lead the architectural evolution toward a multi-tenant screening platform - laying the technical foundation for both internal product launches and external developer-facing APIs.

Raise the engineering bar: Set standards for system design, API consistency, and operational rigor across backend and ML-adjacent systems; mentor senior engineers and lead high-stakes design reviews.

Ensure operational excellence: Own system reliability, observability, and latency, ensuring production systems adapt quickly to sudden changes in global sanctions lists or traffic spikes, and participate in an on-call rotation for these systems.

Who you are

We're looking for someone who meets the minimum requirements to be considered for the role. If you meet these requirements, you are encouraged to apply. The preferred qualifications are a bonus, not a requirement.

Minimum requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years in a strategic technical leadership role on core infrastructure, distributed systems, or platform engineering.

Proven experience designing, building, and operating high-throughput, low-latency APIs and distributed backend systems at scale.

Track record of defining technical roadmaps and driving alignment across multiple engineering teams and cross-functional domains.

Hands-on technical depth - comfortable jumping from high-level system architecture down to code-level performance tuning and production debugging.

Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with a track record of articulating technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred qualifications

Domain experience in financial crimes, sanctions screening, AML (Anti-Money Laundering), entity resolution, or high-stakes trust & safety platforms.

Familiarity with applying LLMs or ML to operational workflows (e.g., case triage, entity resolution, review automation), or experience with fuzzy string matching and NLP for entity matching.

Experience building investigator/analyst tooling, case management systems, or human-in-the-loop review workflows.

Experience building platform products or APIs consumed by both internal engineering teams and external developers (e.g., API backward compatibility, client libraries).

Prior experience leading 0-1 platform builds or major architectural modernizations from concept to production.

Tech stack experience across multi-language environments (e.g., Primarily Ruby and Java) and modern data infrastructure

Comfortable navigating ambiguity and making high-judgment engineering calls in a fast-moving regulatory environment

Sample Stripe interview questions

1
Design a Distributed LRU Cache
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2
Design an application performance monitoring system
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3
Design a rate limiter
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4
What strategies would you use to ensure fault tolerance and data persistence in a distributed cache?
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5
Design an autocomplete Typeahead Suggestion system.
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